CONTEMPORARY ART | Very early man felt the need to witness his sojourn on earth by carving rock. It was 20,000 years ago. The Neolithic era is when he begins to move rock—but also large volumes of earth—in order to create sites or works sometimes very sophisticated, at Stonehenge, Er Grah, Silbury Hill, Carnac... These ancestral practises, of which traces can be particularly found in the beginning of our era in Nazca, are reactivated in the XXth century by the precursors and pioneers of Land Art, notably Isamu Noguchi, Group “I”, Richard Long, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, and of course Michael Heizer. Today, these practises continue to inspire a wider new generation of artists (Nikolaj Recke, Jorge Satorre...) in which Régis Perray is included.

Michael Heizer, Régis Perray: two artists, two periods, two attitudes, two forms, two visions of the world, two conceptions of art, two practises of ground, two apprehensions of space and matter and collective memory. One has moved tons of rocks since the late 60’s with his bulldozers, excavators and cranes; the other rather handles grams, since the mid-90’s, with his broom, sponges, scrapers and his mini construction machines. Double standards. Two sets of rules. Observatoire du Land Art curated a “meeting” by proposing Régis Perray to perform a symbolic action echoing the pharaonic displacement of Michael Heizer’s boulder, before its permanent installation above the gigantic trench constructed on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus.Between February 28 and March 10, 2012, Perray moved each day on the French West coast 340 grams of dust with a small dumper, while each night, on the American West coast, a monumental transporter was delivering Heizer’s 340-ton rock to LACMA. Because of the jet lag between Los Angeles and Nantes, both displacements occurred simultaneously. The remote experience of the very slow progress of the 295-foot long convoy was like a projection of oneself onto the journey, which was
envisioned as such by proxy through Perray's action. If the “meeting” between the pioneer artist of the great American outdoors and the old Europe-based young artist could be surprising a priori, the nature of their interventions and operating methods put them only seemingly at odds. This confrontation actually reveals affinities regarding their apprehension of the world.Both, by their full commitment in works which merge art and life, by their deep-rooted attachment to the earth, to the ground and to the question of vacuum, by their fascination with the desert and their contemporary look at Ancient Civilizations, lead us to reflections that go beyond the matter they move. Beyond the feats of engineering, entertainment and beautiful pictures, well over economic or ecological controversies, they convey two universals: we are all affected by gravity / we will all return to dust.Michael Heizer combines a several-million-year old rock with a concrete structure built only a few months ago and meant to last over 3,500 years. Régis Perray gathered a few grams of dust from the vault of Chartres Cathedral, “a place that is younger than Heizer’s rock, but older than the history of the United States.” From matter, we are drifting into time, toward a thought about time. Ta meta ta phusika… Heizer / Perray, toward a metaphysic of art?

Many thanks to Michael Govan (LACMA) for his long-standing commitment to promoting Land Art, Zev Yaroslavsky (Los Angeles County Supervisor) and Scott Tennent (LACMA) for their numerous articles that have been so helpful, Danny Johnston for finding the rock in 2006, Stephen Vander Hart (Stone Valley Quarry), Shannon & Wilson, Buro Happold, MATT Construction and all people involved in this project we may have forgotten.

Thank you also to all the generous donors, without whom Levitated Mass would probably never have been possible: Jane and Terry Semel, Bobby Kotick, Carole Bayer Sager and Bob Daly, Beth and Joshua Friedman, Steve Tisch Family Foundation, Elaine Wynn, Linda, Bobby, and Brian Daly, Richard Merkin, MD, and the Mohn Family Foundation.